All posts tagged Minorities

When hardline Islamist rebels took over swaths of Latakia province this week, it provided them with their first outpost on the Mediterranean Sea.

The military offensive was symbolic for several reasons: rebels from al Nusra Front taking over northern parts of Bashar al Assad’s hometown province while the Turkish air force shot down a regime war plane trying to bombard the rebel advancement, as it flew near their shared border. Nusra is al Qaeda’s sanctioned offshoot in Syria. Read More »

The veteran leader of Egypt’s historic Jewish community was buried last week, a woman whose efforts to keep the embers of the ancient community glowing during decades of oppression and neglect brought her international admiration and controversy.

Carmen Weinstein, the 82-year-old Cairo native, outlived all of Egypt’s military dictators, the two wars between the country of her birth and the Jewish state of Israel and almost all of Egypt’s other Jews. With her passing, only an estimated three dozen Jews remain living in the region’s most populous Muslim state. Read More »